Years of Poems and Spirits

Read an article on the New Yorker about the pending anointment of the first female bishop in Anglican Church. The resentment of women among some Brits is just unbelievable. I would thought of it as some kind of shock journalism had it NOT been printed on the New Yorker.

One man said something like, “Can you imagine the anger in me, if I had to kneel before a bishop, knowing there is a female body behind the robe?” It is just plain astonishing.

I wouldn’t have cared as much had it came out of the mouth of a priest in Alabama. But the English has the oldest Democracy, one that is closest to the Platonic form. It has given the world some of the greatest liberal thinkers like Darwin, Burke, Hume, J.S. Mills and so on. Yet till this day, such devilish sentiment is strong enough to counter natural progression. It really shake to the core my belief in man’s ability (and the desire) to transcend himself.

The Greek debt crisis – had an interesting exchange with Debra G. I didn’t think EU will drop Greek after all. She stated the standard economist line: too much unchecked government spending. We should learned the lesson and rein in deficit.

I think she, like many economists, missed the political aspect of it all. To dig deeper, hers is the same “Economic Man” argument. But how to dispense wealth, in the end, is as socio-political as it is about economics.

The Greeks chose a collective life style. They are paying for its irrational consequence. Yet such a life style was hardly “wrong” to them. The economist may start a game of death watch. But even after a spectacular crash, people still live. As long as they are not wiped out and took the polity with them, it is hard to envision they suddenly change their life style just because of this one event.

And the political calculation may be enough to keep the Greeks in the euro zone. After all, euro is more than a widely pegged Deutsch mark: it is a statement of a political desire of cohabitation. The fact it was born in the first place was a shock to me. It is still very difficult to comprehend the collective resolve behind the decision till this very day.

I asked Debra whether it is possible that the desire to keep a favorable exchange rate may be a good enough excuse to keep Greece inside euro zone. She hasn’t replied yet.

Lady Gaga: mesmerized by her “Bad Romance”. I seldom paid attention to pop artist, but am totally taken by her. I have watched the video four times now. Every time I felt a surge of energy and excitement.

Her performance has a psychotic element that is hard to describe. I heard she used to do hard drugs, maybe that is why the imaginary is very hallucinative. Yet the video is a fairly cohesive story: the expressions of desire, suffering, revenge and dark humor are well harmonized.

At the end of the day, creativity is the most seductive element of human communication. We clamor for that more than for anything else.

Someone should tell that to the Chinese … haha

After posting the long message (to YSL), I kind of lost any interest of writing anything. But I still need to write something. After a while, when I come to this blog, all I can think of is to read my own posts. That is not good.

Listened to the last couple of episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher recently and thought he’s not as fun as he used to be. For this reason alone, I really miss the Bush years. The outrage-turned-sarcasm … that was really creative. But, as cynical as Maher is, he still gives Hope and Decency a chance when he sees one. I was hoping him would declare war on both.

Read Game Change in record time. What struck me the most is how much individual matters in history. The age old of hero-worship is not without merit. In fact, it matters just as much even in an institutional setting. Obama started his campaign as the least likely to win but overcame the Clinton machine and then the GOP machine. Martha Coakley started hers as a shoo-in but lost miserably. What history would look like now had Obama didn’t win or Coakley did?

Have I been giving institutions too much credit/weight in political development? How should I attenuate my own perception of the relationship between Individual and Institution?

Work has not gone well but I am kind of taking refuge in seeing my predictions coming to pass. Picking up this “Semantic Web” stuff. It is really interesting. It is the closest thing in Computer Science to epistemology. Hopefully, by practicing it, I will come to understand some larger topics.

Also reading Millward’s Xinjiang History. Haven’t had so much excitement for a long while. I don’t know whether I will be disappointed again in the end. Have I seen all the patterns in history? So far, it has been promising: it is like seeing different troupes playing on the same stage one after another. Each play is short enough as not to calcify into some kind of “civilization”. How refreshing!

Had some bumpy ride at home. Not sure what is to come. Song finds this quote that is very true, “God has chosen relatives for us. But thanks God we can choose our own friends”.

SL told me of a possible assignment to Dharamsala. That got us started talking about Dalai, Tibetan Buddhism and others. He brought up the idea that Dalai, in a different setting, could have been a spiritual leader for Han Chinese. It certainly struck a chord with me and a lot more.

Wrote another lengthy reply to him. I think it is worth keeping here:

First, why there isn’t a vibrant Tibetan community? Second, can we say a culture is backward? If so, how do we make a comparison? Third, how much do we Chinese need spirituality?

On the first point, I always thought that any major religion ought to be communal. You know, the Catholics, the Lutherans, the Muslims and the Jews, etc. But if what you said is true, then Tibetan Buddhism seems to be a prominent exception. I just wonder why this is the case?

An “obvious” explanation points to the fact that the terrain in Tibet prevents large community to congregate. But that is not entirely plausible. After all, when Islam started from the Arab Peninsular, the region wasn’t a metropolis built on oasis.

Therefore, it seems there is something in the Tibetan Buddhism itself that is unique. Maybe it is not an organized religion after all. Or even a major religion. But a highly stylized (e.g. full of rituals) spiritual movement. I am not trying to split hair here. What I see in the difference b/w Spirituality and Religion is precisely in the communal part.

In other words, unlike Catholicism, for example, Tibetan Buddhism never tried to build a world parallel to the secular one. In Catholicism, for example, the Church hierarchy always existed along side the secular rulers, be that Emperors or Prime Ministers. One can be a corrupt civil servant and a pious Catholic at the same time. But in Tibet, I don’t think there was such a separation.

If looked this way, there is little wonder why, in exile, Dalai still assumes dual roles. And naturally so. I remember it was reported that not long ago, in order to temper internal tension, Dalai threatened to quit as the head of the government. And his threat seemed to have worked.

I guess this realization (i.e. Tibetan Buddhism’s scope) doesn’t change anything. But it is a “aha” moment for me.

On the second point, you mentioned that you are not sure whether we are in a position to judge, or whether we are too arrogant. I had similar misgivings before. But I didn’t want to fall into the other extreme: nihilism (we just can’t tell who is superior) or relativism (we are not better, we are just different). I don’t think either one is Rational, or fair to the other side.

What I now think is, there IS a way to compare two cultures or two peoples. And it is pretty simple – just compare the breadth and depth of “meta-concepts” in their vocabularies, and you can tell which one is more sophisticated or superior than the other.

The so-called “meta-concept” means level of abstraction. If “blue” or “red” is a concept, then “color” is a meta-concept on top of that. And “attribute” (as in “color is a kind of attribute for an object”) is yet another level deep.

An example of the breadth of meta-concept would be the word “deja vu”. There is actually no good original Chinese word that corresponds to this concept, which implies the French “know” something we didn’t. Of course, there are many things in Chinese that are not translatable.

Jean Piaget was a pioneering child psychologist. He observed a similar (or parallel) pattern in children’s cognitive development (but that is at an individual level). Chomsky’s natural language theory also has some influence on me: he sees a “tree-like” structure being essential in all human languages. I believe it is so because such a pattern mirrors knowledge structure.

All I am trying to do is to answer my own doubts – are all cultures really all equal but just different? As a liberal minded person, it is tempting to think that way. But I just can’t reconcile this statement with all the stereotypes I was brought up with At the end of the day, I’d rather live with an explainable bad thinking than an unexplained good thinking.

But that doesn’t mean the Tibetans are inherently inferior. There are all kind of meta-concepts. Some are in science, technology (West beats out all East). Some in social relationship (East Asia beats out the rest of the world combined). And some in Spirituality. I always wondered why during the peak of the Roman empire, a tiny minority of the Jewish people were able to start a religion that converted almost the rest of the Empire. Maybe this can be explained by the asymmetry in meta-concepts in Spirituality. In this sense, your hunch that Tibetan Buddhism may one day fill the void in Chinese Spirituality is not far fetched. At least it has historical precedence.

Now the last point (if you have not been bored by now) – how much do we Chinese need spirituality? That is a question I have been struggling mightily with recently. It is a large topic, I haven’t really thought it through. So what I say here may not all make sense.

I would interpret the pursuit of spirituality as the “seek of meaning”. In an vernacular sense, we further imply “spirituality” as “seek answers in super-natural”. But at the end of the day, it is an Existential quest: why do I exist? What do I live for?

What I see as the fundamental difference between China and the West may be **simplistically** summarized as,

Whereas a Westerner live to seek meaning, a Chinese seeks meaning to keep on living.

I think the first half is easy to see – starting from Plato on-down, the Western culture was driven by “zealots”. Most of those zealots were religiously inspired, but there are plenty who were not. There is a movie currently showing about Darwin’s own struggle once he realized what he discovered. Also think of those who devoted their lives for public causes, from Green Peace to the Red Army (as the German terrorist group in the 60s) … They are nuts because they believe they live for a reason.

For a Chinese, it is almost the other way around. I was talking to a lady in her fifties who grew up in a collective farm on a deserted island in JiangXi. Her parents were both university professors and were 下放 there for many year. What struck me was not only the hardship they lived through, but the absurdity. For example, they had a 10-day week (so a week goes from 星期一 to 星期十) and many things like that.

So I asked her what she think of those ridiculous things now. She laughed and said “they were soooo funny, even back then”. It was a pretty revealing moment.

In a way, either by necessity or by habit or tradition or education, Chinese people learn to seek meaning, or something valuable, in daily life—regardless it is in the form of banality or extremity, to console themselves and to live on. I guess I am not saying more than what the movie “活着” was trying to tell us, but I certainly have a very new appreciation of this aspect recently.

There was a brief moment in Chinese history where we felt just “to live” wasn’t enough. When Tan Sitong said, “let me be the first to shed blood for Reform” it was the beginning of a new ethos. But after the Cultural Revolution, people are tired of the new, foreign way of seeing life’s meaning (and June 4th certainly was the last nail in the coffin). Together with the rise of economy and personal well being, the Chinese people start to embrace whole-heartedly of their old selves.

So to answer my own question – how much do Chinese need spirituality? At this point, I don’t think there is a whole lot.